Surat: The Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) produces nearly 40MW of green energy from wind, solar and biogas. Another 10MW of energy will be produced in the next 12 months.
Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India, had said a couple of months ago that as far as renewable energy is concerned, no other city in the country can match Surat which has set up its own wind power plants and produces 30MW electricity.
Surat Municipal Corporation, against its annual requirement of 245 giga watts per hour (GWh), produces 86.5 GWh of renewable energy, which is 35% of its requirements. This helps it save Rs52 crore from its annual energy bill of Rs167 crore. Besides, this also reduces greenhouse gas emission by 95,720 tonne per year.
Municipal commissioner M Thennarasan said, “No other city in the country had wind power plants until recently. Ahmedabad had set up a 6MW wind power plant recently. Surat has been working on renewable energy since 2003 and started by setting up small biogas power plants. City also set up wind power plants for its water supply system in 2004. The capacity of wind power plants alone is now more than 30MW.”
“No other civic body in the country has its own wind power plants to generate electricity. Diamond City meets nearly 35% of its electricity needs from green energy produced by it,” said an official from the ministry, adding that many cities are going in for biogas and solar energy production but at a minuscule scale.
Surat would be the second city after Thiruvananthapuram to set up 100KW floating solar panels at Gopi Talav this year. SMC will also install solar panels on rooftops of BRTS bus stops to produce 200KW of energy besides setting up another wind power plant of 3MW capacity.
Furthermore, 10MW solar plants have been commissioned in the city on private rooftops under the state government’s solar power scheme. This will produce 5MW solar energy.
“We aim to have an installed capacity to generate as much energy that we require. We are 50% away from meeting our target which we hope to by 2022,” SMC additional city engineer K H Khatwani said.
